Abstract

Viscous jets of a molten metal ready to be transferred into the arc welding pools are inherently unstable, and the associated dropletformation can be influenced by modulation of surface tension forces, which are strong functions of variations of temperature and surfactant composition. This principle can be effectively used to augment transfer rates, especially in microwelding situations. The present work deals with development of closed-formed mathematical expressions directly depicting various modes of the associated capillary instabilities. The analytical form of the final solution depicts a variation of time required for dropletformation as a function of the surface tension modulation, corresponding to different instability modes.